ZIMASA MPEMNYAMA

Consenting to Coercion? Saidiya Hartman on black womanhood, love and social life

Saidiya Hartman’s new book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval is a lesson on black beauty in its extreme deprivation. The compilation of archival material chronicling the lives of early twentieth century black women speaks life into those lives the white world created itself against. It examines the ways they navigated the world after the ‘abolition’ of slavery – how they migrated to the cities, from the slave plantations in the South, in search of the freedom to move, to question, to be.

Hartman carefully unfolds the materials through which she reads and understands these lives. Using landlord journals, interviews, surveys and written notes from sociologists, psychiatrists, social workers and psychologists, trial transcripts, photographs and prison case files, the lives of these black women are reconstructed through an interesting interplay of personal narration, direct quotes and a piecing together of events to fill in the gaps. These documents depict these women as problems – they construct black women as stains on white morality, decency, and overall, humanity. Hartman, therefore, tries to dig up the histories, the voices, the intimate connections of black women who easily disappear and are unaccounted for in the archive. The archive, as holder of historical memory, has power to construct meaning and value. Hartman is always aware of this power and is intentional in how she shifts her gaze to the discarded, to lift them up and make sure they do not vanish “within slavery’s shadow.”[1]Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval, Serpent’s Tail, 2019, p. 17.

For Hartman, the turn of the twentieth century is significant as it signals a period when “young black women were in open rebellion”[2]Hartman, p. xiii.. This rebellion was signalled by the restlessness inherent in the actions of these women, their radical refusal to live the lives of servitude prescribed for them, and their loving in open, queer and generous ways. She insists on viewing young black women as “sexual modernists, free lovers, radicals, and anarchists”[3]Hartman, p. xv., while understanding that this insistence on being was countered with a violent pushback. These “surplus women”, the “wayward” or those “often described as promiscuous, reckless, wild” intimately experienced violence, through arrest, sexual assault, surveillance, racial profiling and confinement. Yet, they made life – and love – even in this zone of death.

The book begins with Hartman describing, in painstaking detail, the world these women occupied. The slum. The ghetto. The Negro quarter. The verse echoes Frantz Fanon’s lucid description of the “native town, the Negro village, the medina, the reservation” in the colonial context[4] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, Penguin Books, 2001, p. 30.. The place which resembles still, acrid green water. Too filthy to occupy, but always buzzing with activity. We are shown black-and-white images of the slum, alleys, cramped up rooms and portraits.

In one portrait, a naked black girl poses on a sofa. Without a name to locate her, Hartman recreates her world, narrates the possibilities and circumstances that landed her there, and explains the weight the image carries in speaking to experiences of black women’s bodies being open for sexual coercion and violation. “Looking at the photograph, one wonders if she had ever been a child”, Hartman writes[5]Hartman, p. 29.. But, the luxury of childhood is one not afforded black children. Young black girls are deemed not deserving of protection, they are property “intended for public use”[6]Hartman, p. 26.. Her pose in a Grande Odalisque-like manner gives the impression that she consented to the image being taken. But Hartman poses the piercing question, “[h]ow does she consent to coercion?” What is made evident here, is that this kind of violence was necessary and a routine feature of life after slavery. It normalised the frequent encounters Blacks had with death. Blackness existing in a “space of negation” meant, and indeed continues to mean, “Black life as it is lived near death, as deathliness”[7]Christina Sharpe, In the wake: on Blackness and being, Duke University Press, 2016, p. 8..

Hartman further explores the blurred
lines associated with gender for the blacks existing in the afterlife of
slavery. What did it mean to be a woman? What did it mean to be a man? What did
it mean to be a black woman and what did it mean to be a black man?
Furthermore, what did it mean to occupy a black body that obliterated all the
lines associated with womanhood and/or manhood? What did it mean for your body
to spill-over boundaries, moving to terrains which are grotesque in the white
imagination of acceptable gender norms? Could black women be called women?
Hartman explains:

“It was obvious that gender as a category was not elastic enough to encompass the radical differences in the lived experience of black and white women… Half a woman announced the black female’s failure to realize the aspirations or meet the benchmark of humanity.”[8]Hartman, p. 184.

Black women’s labor also signalled a shift in the constitution of black households. Unlike white women, black women were taxed, paid a pittance and they were bread winners. And, unlike white women, as Hartman clarifies:

“black women’s labor was treated as if they were men, inaugurating a centuries-long crisis about the status of black women’s work and their deviation from gender norms… The failure to comply with or achieve gender norms would define black life; and this “ungendering” inevitably marked black women (and men) as less than human.”[9]Hartman, p. 186.

There is something oddly familiar
about the delicate stories Hartman narrates. Whether it is the packed to beyond
capacity slums where stench, romance, murder, love, harassment and procreation
all danced in disturbing harmony, or the familiar picture of mother and
children dancing in their tiny living-room, oblivious, even if for a
split-second, to the dangers that lie beyond the frame of the door. They are a
reminder of Cynthia Joni, the domestic worker who was beaten up by a white man
in Kenilworth, Cape Town because he thought she was a prostitute. Or the
homeless transwomen sex workers in Woodstock, Cape Town who face exclusion from
labour, education, healthcare and housing. Or of Phumza Pita, who was shot in
the face by a police officer after she questioned the conduct of the police when
shutting down a drinking spot in New Crossroads, Cape Town.

The awareness of black life being
lived near or as death never escapes
the narration. It is a sharp blade that reawakens the senses, even as one
relaxes at the pleasure of reading about black women owning their sexualities,
bodies, labor, love. This addition to Saidiya Hartman’s
repertoire is priceless.